As I can now see clearly, the first draft of this paper was an exercise in attempting to meet a conclusion I already held as truth. For obvious reasons, that failed. But the conclusion, that religiously-founded arguments have no place in the context of the United States’ governmental policy, has become no less true to me, despite my inability to find evidence that the “founding fathers” shared this conviction. I’ve come to realize that my desire to prove this idea is very connected to one of the important reasons I ended up at law school. My dad, whose temperament I increasingly seem to have inherited, resides, ideologically, in the camp of the enemy. He gets his news from Fox and listens to Rush Limbaugh daily; one summer he even offered to pay me California’s hourly minimum wage to tune into Rush daily. That didn’t work out. |